You’re not alone. These are some of the things that made me tear my hair out as a manager (in the end I just had to shave it all off to stop myself doing it) – and these problems seem insoluble – worse than that, everything you do just seems to make it worse.

Geeks to the rescue!

Luckily, some very clever people with rather variable social skills have created a bunch of tools that seem to deal with these problems very well (Hey, you’re reading one now!). What’s more they’ve made them pretty much freely available – all you have to do is know what you want to do and work out how best to do it.

If you’ve been reading the right papers, you’ll have heard of blogging some time ago – what you may not realise is that blogs can be more than a teen-angst diary or a place to add more hilarious pictures of your cat – they are also a business tool that can be applied to marketing and communications, project management and improving the productivity of individuals and teams.

You might even have heard of a mysterious relation of blogs – RSS. Really Simple Syndication is increasingly being used to help people both focus their own reading, but also reach their audience much more effectively. RSS is also spawning a new generation of search engines that can help you find the very latest web-based information while also letting new readers find your stuff much more easily.

Those who really should get out more will have heard the word Wiki. A wiki is a very simple website that anyone (yes anyone) can edit – they are very useful for collaboration, helping people who may be geographically separate to work up ideas, create and edit documents and to organise events. Take a look at my wiki if you like

These tools together can boost your productivity enormously whether you choose to use them over the internet or within your corporate network, but if you’re not a geek and you don’t know any geeks (or perhaps you’d just like to keep your geek-related activity quiet)how can you relieve some of the frustrations of coprorate life? What could your organisation do with them? What are others in your industry doing with them? Just how do you get started?

“The Normal Business Person’s Guide to Blogging, Wikis and RSS” is a one-day workshop that I’m offering now to help people look at these issues and work out how they can benefit.

Who should attend?

There are three key criteria:
Are you a person? Good, ‘cos there’s no cats allowed.

Do you do business? OK so the definition of business is pretty wide here – I work with lots of public-sector people who do lots of “business”.

Now here’s the clincher… are you normal? I think this pretty much comes down to “Do you need to communicate better with people inside and outside of your organisation? Do you want to serve your customers better? Must you have value for money?” If you’re shouting Yes! Yes! Yes! then you’re normal enough to attend the workshop.

What’s in it for you?

If you attend, you will come away with a better understanding of:

What these tools are and what they can do.

How the tools are being used already by your customers, suppliers or competitors.

The risks of not adopting these tools.

You will also see:

How ridiculously easy it is to start and maintain a blog.

How blogs encourage conversations that can turn prospects into customers.

How a wiki can be used to jointly create something useful.

How RSS can speed up information flows while improving how well that information is targeted.

Finally you will have the opportunity to talk about how best you could use these technologies to improve customer relations, internal communications and (if that’s the bag you’re into) sell more stuff!

The workshop is best suited to a small group of people (6-8), in a single organisation, or who otherwise have to work together. Contact me in the usual way (lloyd AT perfectpath DOT co DOT uk) to set up a day’s session for your team.

You’re not alone. These are some of the things that made me tear my hair out as a manager (in the end I just had to shave it all off to stop myself doing it) – and these problems seem insoluble – worse than that, everything you do just seems to make it worse.

Geeks to the rescue!

Luckily, some very clever people with rather variable social skills have created a bunch of tools that seem to deal with these problems very well (Hey, you’re reading one now!). What’s more they’ve made them pretty much freely available – all you have to do is know what you want to do and work out how best to do it.

If you’ve been reading the right papers, you’ll have heard of blogging some time ago – what you may not realise is that blogs can be more than a teen-angst diary or a place to add more hilarious pictures of your cat – they are also a business tool that can be applied to marketing and communications, project management and improving the productivity of individuals and teams.

You might even have heard of a mysterious relation of blogs – RSS. Really Simple Syndication is increasingly being used to help people both focus their own reading, but also reach their audience much more effectively. RSS is also spawning a new generation of search engines that can help you find the very latest web-based information while also letting new readers find your stuff much more easily.

Those who really should get out more will have heard the word Wiki. A wiki is a very simple website that anyone (yes anyone) can edit – they are very useful for collaboration, helping people who may be geographically separate to work up ideas, create and edit documents and to organise events. Take a look at my wiki if you like

These tools together can boost your productivity enormously whether you choose to use them over the internet or within your corporate network, but if you’re not a geek and you don’t know any geeks (or perhaps you’d just like to keep your geek-related activity quiet)how can you relieve some of the frustrations of coprorate life? What could your organisation do with them? What are others in your industry doing with them? Just how do you get started?

“The Normal Business Person’s Guide to Blogging, Wikis and RSS” is a one-day workshop that I’m offering now to help people look at these issues and work out how they can benefit.

Who should attend?

There are three key criteria:
Are you a person? Good, ‘cos there’s no cats allowed.

Do you do business? OK so the definition of business is pretty wide here – I work with lots of public-sector people who do lots of “business”.

Now here’s the clincher… are you normal? I think this pretty much comes down to “Do you need to communicate better with people inside and outside of your organisation? Do you want to serve your customers better? Must you have value for money?” If you’re shouting Yes! Yes! Yes! then you’re normal enough to attend the workshop.

What’s in it for you?

If you attend, you will come away with a better understanding of:

What these tools are and what they can do.

How the tools are being used already by your customers, suppliers or competitors.

The risks of not adopting these tools.

You will also see:

How ridiculously easy it is to start and maintain a blog.

How blogs encourage conversations that can turn prospects into customers.

How a wiki can be used to jointly create something useful.

How RSS can speed up information flows while improving how well that information is targeted.

Finally you will have the opportunity to talk about how best you could use these technologies to improve customer relations, internal communications and (if that’s the bag you’re into) sell more stuff!

The workshop is best suited to a small group of people (6-8), in a single organisation, or who otherwise have to work together. Contact me in the usual way (lloyd AT perfectpath DOT co DOT uk) to set up a day’s session for your team.

I'm the founder of the Tuttle Club and fascinated by organisation. I enjoy making social art and building communities, if you'd like some help from me feel free to e-mail me: Lloyd dot Davis at Gmail dot Com or call +44 (0)79191 82825